Stop the world! I want to get off!
There is nothing quite like game development when it unreachable ends! You think you're finished, hit your target, turn the corner, and BAM! There's another 2000 things to do you've got no idea how to tackle.
novaWARS is coming on nicely. First testers are mostly reporting great control, meaning I've accomplished what I set out to do - bring console type games to touch screens by reinventing the input tech. In theory I can release a public beta, get users, finish the game, with the engine mostly complete and just needing the content. Job done.
How wrong am I?!
Having a great game means nothing if no-one knows about it and downloads it. Communication is everything, and suddenly I'm feeling very lost.
All of that! Needs to handled right. Landing pages and MailChimp and Twitter and Facebook and blogs and YouTube vids and...making the game is a teeny-weeny part of creating the game. It's bonkers! And there are so many tools to 'help' you, all of which cost money that you don't have when you can't even afford an artist. And you can't crowd-fund without being popular, and you can't get popular without spending money? Is that how it works??
You need a Twitter following, obviously. Some people manage to get 20k followers without any content whatsoever! So you must need to use some marketing tool. I've just tried one the past couple of days and it signed me up to 1000 nonsense accounts, got my Twitter account suspended, and just felt icky. Bots following bots. Is that what these accounts with thousands of followers actually have? Thousands of bots who don't care about what your game development progress tweets? Thousands of accounts that don't even *see* your tweets because they are getting 100 tweets a minute from the thousands of accounts they follow?
So, with the game kinda finished enough to be played, I now need to learn Business. I'll update this blog with what I find and don't find so hopefully other naive indies like myself will be able to deal with this without the insanity I'm feeling. Presently though, having written the most awesome gamers'-game on mobile, and gone through all the coding and development stress, to hit this new wall is...life, I guess.
